Top 3 Updates that Cause Drastic Price Changes in OSRS

Today we are talking about top 3 updates that caused drastic price changes in OSRS during the last two years. These price changes happened because of seemingly minor updates to the game. Some items went from 12 gp to 1M Old School RuneScape gold in one afternoon. Other items like the Dragon hunter crossbow increased gradually since release.

Fossil Island

When Fossil island came out, there was a new quest released with it - Bone Voyage. When doing Bone Voyage, 2 bottles of Vodka are needed to complete the quest. Getting 2 bottles of Vodka is not very hard because they are sold in a few shops, but they are not sold in massive quantity.

In the first couple of hours after the quest released, everyone was looking for Vodka. Vodka’ price on the Grand Exchange skyrocketed to 500K gp for 1 bottle and it was even sold for nearly 1M RuneScape gold each, but this didn’t last a long time.

The most popular spot to obtain Vodka was the Tree Gnome Stronghold but it was always sold out there. Vodka is also sold in the Lighthouse but there were not many people buying it there.

There is a little bit of conspiracy theory to go along with this. You can see from the image below that a few weeks before this update, there are nearly 14K bottles of Vodka traded on the GE, you might think that somebody knew about the update and bought a lot of Vodka. But there are some people think it was because Vodka was just a “Meme Item” at that time, or it’s just a coincidence.

Zul-andra Teleports

When Zul-andra teleports released, they were dropped in quantities of 50 per drop, shortly reduced to 20. Because of this, Zul-andra teleport scrolls were only 100 rsgp at the time due to the oversupply. However, on Oct. 15, 2015, Jagex did a quick update that changed the drop rate to 1. This quickly shot the price up to 20K rsgp each over the next 1-2 weeks, and at its peak, it was 60K rsgp each. On the day of the update, 9M Zul-andra teleport scrolls were traded on the GE.

This update was controversial because it was such a drastic change to the drop rate that some people made a ton of RS gold due to the higher prices. Shortly after the 25 May 2017 update that decreased the average value of loots from Zulrah by 30%, on 15 June 2017 the drop quantity was increased from 1 to 4. So now its price is about 20K RuneScape 2007 gold each.

Dragon Hunter Crossbow

The Dragon hunter crossbow would have been an amazing investment when it came out. It was released with the Chambers of Xeric update. When it was released, the Dragon hunter crossbow only had an Accuracy and Damage bonus of 10% when fighting dragons, but Jagex changed it to 30% this year. When the Dragon hunter crossbow came out, it was worth 20M-30M gp. However, in the last year and a half, its price has been consistently going up, and now the price is over 120M RS gold.

Please click FlippingOldschool’s video for more details on the 3 updates that caused massive price changes in OSRS, and all the content of this article is quoted from his video:

It is the only Raids 1 item to consistently rise up in price. The main cause for its continuous increase in price is the release of Vorkath which came out after Raids 1. Vorkath being one of the best money makers in the game and the Dragon hunter crossbow being the best in slot at Vorkath has made it such a desirable weapon that the price is just continuously increasing.